Sales are the lifeblood of your business, so it’s no surprise that equipping your people with the skills and confidence to overcome sales challenges is high on your priority list.
You find a consultancy, discuss your needs, agree on a programme, invest time and money, skill your people up, and see an instant result. It all seems to have been a worthwhile investment!
But then you start to notice the sales figures dropping. Perhaps you put it down to a temporary blip? After all, we all go through periods where our sales numbers drop a bit. Unfortunately, six months later, you’re back to pre-programme levels and no sign of them improving.
What’s going on?
A Lack of Internal Support
Too many businesses assume that they can bring in a consultant to deliver a programme and everything will be taken care of for them. However, when the consultant leaves, who is going to ensure your team don’t slip back into old habits?
Successful sales training programmes always involve internal support. Some companies, for example, will appoint Ambassadors who work with the consultant on the preparation, design and delivery, and most importantly, post-programme review and analysis. They’ll conduct appraisals and evaluations throughout the programme, as well as post-training reviews to ensure that skills aren’t being forgotten.
Involving Ambassadors in preparation and design also ensures that your sales training programme is relevant to your industry and market. An off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all training programme is little different to buying a dozen copies of a random sales book on Amazon and handing them out to your team. The information won’t be entirely useless, but it won’t be as relevant as it could have been. That relevance can significantly improve your margins.
Expecting Standalone Programmes to Work
We learn through repetition, just as we maintain and grow our skills through repetition. Roger Federer and Serena Williams didn’t win Wimbledon once and figure they never needed to train again to stay on top. They trained almost every day because even if you’re a prodigy in a given field, you still need to practice and hone your skills as much as you can.
When a company books a one-off training programme, they might see a quick result, but without the support in place to ensure continued development, it’s akin to someone learning how to do something in Photoshop once and expecting to remember how to do it forever.
Ideally, although more costly, sales training programmes should take the form of an academy or multi-session programme with review sessions and linked modules. The academy approach doesn’t just teach new skills with each module, but it embeds and reinforces previously learned skills by offering a wider variety of applications.
A Failure to Supplement the Programme
The most effective sales training programmes make use of a variety of supplemental materials to help embed and reinforce the learning outcomes. This can take the form of surveys, quizzes, bespoke short-form videos, reading lists, and follow-up sessions.
Some organisations we’ve worked with have even embedded the training materials into their own Learner Management System (LMS) used by E-Learning platforms such as ours to provide their people with easy access to refresh their memories. By combining such an approach with regular reviews, leaders can be assured that their people are actively engaging with the training months, even years, after the final module.
Too Much Theory
We’re realistic, many people approach training with a “Do we really have to?” mentality. Nobody really wants to be stuck in a room being lectured on how to do their job better. Often leaders don’t appreciate the importance of querying prospective coaches on what approach they favour, and this can lead to serious disappointment with the outcomes. People shouldn’t be bored when learning something because if they are, they’ll switch off.
When we deliver a training programme, we want to ensure that every delegate gains something from the session, and keeping people engaged is paramount. To this end, we favour a mix of theory, practical exercises, role-plays, case studies, discussion, online polling using tools such as Mentimeter, brainstorming, word clouds, and other visual aids.
An investment in sales training shouldn’t be a risk. Finding the right coach, developing the right programme, and working with your consultant to cover all the bases is the best way to ensure that you don’t join the many organisations with buyer’s remorse.
If you’re interested in what we might be able to do for your business, check out our Sales Training page, or Get in Touch!
